We’re tigers. Oh look, I see some prey. It’s a mouse. I bet it’s really juicy. Catch! Mm, juicy. Here you go. Actually we’re leopards. I see… a turtle that is already dead. Pretend our favorite things are mouses and turtles. Mm. Now I’m going to get your coffee boot. Here’s my coffee boot and mama leopard’s coffee boot and daddy leopard’s coffee boot. Can I see the clippers? The chain is so interesting. Okay, can I play with your watch? This is called the… watcheedood. We use it to look at the time and to put more coffee in our coffee boots. It’s exactly seven o’clock. I folded it very nicely. Did you know that it folds like this? Where’s your... what did I say it was? The coffeedood. Watcheeboot. The coffee boot. Here is some more coffee.

My hypothalamus has been trying to cook the rest of my head. This is pausing and thinking of a sort, or it bears the same relation to thinking that undirected noodling bears to actual songs.

Our lemon tree is weathering the drought OK, so far. Half a lemon squeezed into a liter of bubbly water is how I get fighting fit to climb the stairs.

I had notes for a Father’s Day post, on that ceremonial feeling of undesert: you can’t do everything you have to do, and family life, much more than a job, stifles the admitting of it. There is no multitasking, the Pauli exclusion principle, etc.

(Shout from the bathtub: “How do you… make HAM!?”)

Also in that post I would have noted the mourning doves who are nesting on the porch joist outside our back door. I don’t know if they’re the same ones we saw attempting to conceive on the back fence (always awkward, a bird trying to hover-mount long enough to realize the goal), but these are a model couple in their shared incubation. I’ve seen the shift change in the early evening; a wing whistle announces the incoming partner, the outgoing stands and does an old-man shuffle along the joist, head pressed into the corner of the roof, until it finds room to take off. I’m not sure which is which. Male Zenaida macroura are supposed to be larger and “more colorful,” but they all look large and colorful when they’re a foot away on the porch joist, pale blue eye-ring framing that still stare while you go beneath to take out the trash, big dumb groundling that doesn’t see them.

Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.

Texts and images copyright (C) 2013 Paul Kerschen. Layout adapted from the Single A Tumblr theme by businessbullpen. The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has zygodactylic feet, leaving X-shaped tracks with ambiguous direction. The Pueblo and Hopi used the X symbol to mislead evil spirits. Border folklore in the early twentieth century held that a roadrunner would lead a lost traveler back to his path. In Mexico the roadrunner is known as paisano, countryman.